By way of background concerning some conventional systems, computing devices have traditionally stored information and associated applications and data services locally to the device. Yet, with the evolution of on-line and cloud services, information is increasingly being moved to network providers who perform none, some or all of service on behalf of devices. The evolution of network storage farms capable of storing terabytes of data (with potential for petabytes, exabytes, etc. of data in the future) has created an opportunity to mimic the local scenario in a cloud, with separation of the primary device and the external storage.
However, no cloud service or network storage provider has been able to effectively provide information as a service on any platform, with publishers, developers, and consumers easily publishing, specializing applications for and consuming any kind of data, in a way that can be tracked and audited for all involved. In addition, due to the disparate number of content providers and their typically proprietary schemas for defining data, today, where disparate content providers do not coordinate their publishing acts to the cloud with one another, there is little opportunity to leverage the collective power of such disparate publishing acts.
Content providers who choose to store their data via web services may be reluctant to move their data elsewhere. In order to provide such data for consumption, it would thus be desirable to integrate web services into an infrastructure that facilitates information as a service. To this end, it is noted that data sets stored in relational databases generally exhibit a consistency and uniformity that allows them to be queried and exposed in a uniform manner. Data sets stored in web services, however, lack consistency and uniformity, which makes efficiently exposing such data particularly challenging. Accordingly, it would thus be desirable to provide a mechanism for integrating arbitrary data originating from web services into an infrastructure that facilitates information as a service.
The above-described deficiencies of today's devices and data services are merely intended to provide an overview of some of the problems of conventional systems, and are not intended to be exhaustive. Other problems with the state of the art and corresponding benefits of some of the various non-limiting embodiments may become further apparent upon review of the following detailed description.